2008

It won’t be boring

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
12/30/07

I came up with a great idea for a column that was a retrospective of 2007. I wrote about 70 columns last year. All I need to do is pick twenty words at random from each column, dump them all into one Word Perfect file, and voilá! Instant column!

Now, there IS the fact that the column wouldn’t make much sense, but columns that are annual retrospectives usually are pretty fragmented, so probably no one will notice. Right wingers will further argue that I don’t make any sense anyway, although if the word “Clinton” appears more than twice, I’ll still get hate mail.

But opening 70 files and picking 20 words from each is a lot of work when you think about it, and it’s probably easier just to write a damn column fresh. It might even make sense.

And the fact is you can sum up last year in two words: 2007 sucked.

So let’s talk about 2008 instead.

I’ll remove any and all dramatic tension by observing that the biggest issue we will face in 2008 was the one I said we would face in 2007. And 2006. And before that.

Global warming scared the hell out of everyone except oil industry executives and their pet whores and loons with the clearest and most unmistakable sign of major and immediate change. The arctic sea ice cap melted to less than 2/3rds of any previous melt back, leaving the Northwest Passage open (for the first time ever) for over six weeks. Yes, all the other indicators of global warming were there: the northern hemisphere had the hottest year ever recorded, and worldwide there were more weather events that caused more damage than ever before.

I notice them locally. It never seems to fail that when I write about global warming, the local weather does something cold, and today is an example of that. The forecast low for tonight is 13F, which would be the coldest night of the year. Brr brr brr. Lay on the oak!

Except I remember the first winter we were here, in 1990: it got down to minus 21, and when I asked locals if it usually got that cold here in the winter, they acknowledged that it was exceptional, but about once every other year it would dip below zero for one or two nights. It hasn’t been below zero here since 1997. The nights ARE getting warmer, something we had already noticed in the summertime, when “Siskiyou air conditioning” – using open windows and fans to cool the house at night so it’s nice in the day – started being less efficient. It used to be we turned the main fan off at bedtime in July so the house wouldn’t be flat-out freezing in the morning. Now they usually run all night between June and September. We watch the arms of green vegetation slowly climb up the sides of Mount Shasta, and the decreased amounts of snow (Fourteen feet is considered a heavy winter now; twenty years ago it was the average) and wonder what the weather will be like here twenty years from now. Will we get snow at all?

There’s going to be an election in the US this year. You may have heard about that. If you’re hoping for tips on who will win Iowa or New Hampshire, I’m going to disappoint you. I haven’t the faintest idea. The polls are useless, of course. I’ve seen three polls on Iowa in the past two days, each of which had their own winner. And Republican touting is even harder, since the remaining Republican voters rush from one candidate to another, creating an instant front runner, only to discover that like all the previous front runners, he’s either a moron, a crook, or a lunatic, or multiple choice, and doesn’t represent them. Republicans not only have to run despite Putsch and the war and everything, but they have to run against their own records. Between 2001 and 2007, when they had complete control of the White House, both Houses of Congress, and the Supine Court, they failed to do anything about abortion, immigration, terrorism, crime, bringing God back in the schools, or government intrusion into our lives. In fact, they made most of them substantially worse. If they can’t even appeal to their base, they aren’t going to make much in the way of inroads with people who hate their stances on those issues.

So Democrats will prevail this year, whether they deserve it or not. And they will be an improvement, although it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they will be a significant improvement, or an improvement in the sense that Nikita Khrushchev was an improvement on Josef Stalin. One thing that WILL improve will be the corporate media, which will once again resume its role of investigating government and reporting any and all malfeasance and incompetence it finds, if for all the wrong reasons. They’ll be doing it to help the GOP rather than the country, but at least the shadow reporters at the Times, NBC, and Time will start reporting instead of enabling.

Of course, that will happen in 2009, after the Democrats are in power. For 2008 they’ll pretend that people who don’t “believe in evolution” actually have something to bring to the table to run the world’s biggest superpower.

That role may end in 2008, as well. Europe already is a financial colossus that rivals America. Now Russia is rapidly becoming a third superpower. It has severe structural problems (including two it shares with the US: a decaying infrastructure and a gangster mentality in its business sector), but also has the resolve and wealth to pull it off. China, which I regard as the next big thing the way Japan was in the 1980s (ie, not), has to address huge economic and cultural dislocations within its borders, and if it can’t address them, the government may have to scramble to survive them. In any event, America’s influence in the world will decline.

Fed up? Wondering why people aren’t out in the streets burning cars and busting windows? You aren’t alone.

A friend of mine once observed that the time of greatest danger for any society isn’t when things are getting worse. The time when things are most likely to blow sky-high is just after they’ve hit bottom, and are actually beginning to improve a bit. That’s when people lose patience and are likely to revolt, or the generals decide democracy is a failure, or the coach gets fired.

2008 will be a year of greatest danger. If we get through it, though, things will improve.